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Majority of Americans continue to favor moving away from Electoral College
(www.pewresearch.org)
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this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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Look at third parties and their success in the UK and Canada.
The last general election in the UK was 2019. Conservatives got 43.6% of the vote but 56.2% of the seats. Labor got 32.1% of the votes and 31.1% of the seats.
The biggest national third party, the Liberal Democrats, got 11.6% of the vote but a mere 1.7% of the seats.
In comparison, look at regional third parties. The Scottish National Party got 3.9% of the vote and a whopping 7.4% of the seats. Irish regional parties like Sinn Feinn and the Democratic Unionist Party got a combined 2.3% of the seats with a combined 1.4% of the seats.
Previous elections have been quite similar. In 2015, the far right UKIP won only a single seat after getting a whopping 12.6% of the vote.
Canada is quite similar. The Bloc Quebecois consistently gets more votes than the national New Democratic Party, despite having gotten less than half as many votes.
Understood, all of these countries have terrible electoral systems, that was not my point. My point is that Americans only have a culture of voting for one of two parties, so switching to ranked choice voting will likely change nothing at all, because Americans already practically never even consider alternate options. Hell, I doubt even 10% of them could even name a third party, so why would they consider voting for them all of a sudden just because of the switch to RCV? They're constantly blasted with the same message that you have one of two options, so chances are that they'll just pick one and ignore the rest, just like they do now.
Parties work a bit differently in the US vs e.g. Israel.
In Israel, party insiders choose their politicians. If you want different candidates than an existing party is offering, you have to make your own new party with your own new list.
By contrast, in the US, parties run primary elections where voters pick the candidates. The specifics depend on the state, but in most states the election is held for registered members of that party.
Americans aren't idiots. Most know third party candidates don't do well in plurality elections. So smart progressives, alt-right etc. politicians don't run as a third party candidate against mainstream Democrats and Republicans. Instead, they primary an incumbent Democrat or Republican, like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, or join the primary when the incumbent retired like Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Somewhere like Israel, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Joe Manchin would be in two very different parties. In the US, they're in the same party.
In places where RCV is passed, you absolutely see more candidates running and getting decent percentages of the vote. Because that isn't a terrible strategy any more. Someone like AOC might have run as a Progressive or something rather than primarying the Democrat.
It might give independents more of a voice.